Model shows abandoned cropland offers cool

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Norwegian University of Science and Technology – If you’ve ever sat in the cool shade of a tree on a hot summer day, you already know that shaded areas are cooler than open fields. But is that kind of cooling enough to make a difference in the hotter world of the future?

When a team of researchers looked at more than 20 years of recent land use changes for Europe and combined that with a climate model to provide information on temperatures during the same period, they found the answer to this question is a clear yes.

“When we put all the land cover changes together and looked at how these affected climate, we found a widespread seasonal cooling — up to one degree C in the summer — in western Europe,” said Francesco Cherubini, the senior author of a newly published paper on the findings in Nature Communications and head of the Industrial Ecology Programme at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.

Cherubini and his colleagues say this kind of information is vital to helping Europe plan policies that will encourage the right kind of land use for a warmer future.

“We can couple the global challenge of mitigation with the local need for climate adaption if we choose the right combination of land uses,” he said.

The article is entitled “Predominant regional biophysical cooling from recent land cover changes in Europe.”

To read the full article, visit ntnu.edu.